"But how can I rule seven kingdoms if I cannot rule a single city? He had no answer to that. Dany turned away from them, to gaze out over the city once again. My children need time to heal and learn. My dragons need time to grow and test their wings. And I need the same. I will not let this city go the way of Astapor. I will not let the harpy of Yunkai chain up those I've freed all over again."
— A Dance With Dragons
The Dictatorship! So evil, and so oppressive!
Well, not always.
In Real Life, it's easy to associate authoritarian rule with evil. After all, there have been countless dictators or throne usurpers who have done nothing to their new subjects but bring suffering. In the rare cases where they don't commit atrocities, then it's still hard to decide their true intentions: we are not living inside their head, and things are hardly ever black and white.
Not in fiction, however. The authors can ask a simple question: Is authoritarian rule inherently bad, or is it dangerous should it fall into the hands of the wrong person?
What if people of different political ideologies can put aside their differences, and see that a simple good leader is needed, no matter their type of governing? They aren't simple good little citizens. They don't just pretend to like their country's all-powerful leader; they actually love him. They don't care that they have absolutely no choice over anything. Even if said leader doesn't bring the state into a Utopia, at least he's better than the former leader. Maybe it's such a Crapsack World that the bar is simply so low that anyone over a certain standard is good, and their way of governing doesn't matter.
Alternatively, the country may have been ruled by a supernatural being or an AI for a pretty darn long time, and there have been no troubles so far, so why complain?
Admitting that dictatorships can be good can go two routes:
- The people under said dictatorship admit so themselves. Sometimes certain people are pressured to say this, by fear or by bribing. Or other times they speak genuinely but they have been so brainwashed by propaganda that they ignore evil actions their dictators make, or perhaps they haven't even heard of any. Those don't count. It needs to be shown that most of the general population would admit it under any circumstance. Perhaps they don't need to admit, since they have set up shrines of their dictator everywhere.
- The dictator is shown to have clearly good intentions. No, this is not Utopia Justifies the Means. The leader doesn't commit heinous crimes just to put their country on the road to utopia. They do things that are great for the common people. They don't make empty promises, they act immediately.
Note that this trope uses the term 'dictatorship' in its crudest form: a single person or a group of people hold all power in the country, and they usually obtain this office through illegal means.
He doesn't have to be a literal dictator. Obtaining a throne through usurpy, and keeping the monarch's title would still count.
Although there is not much difference between an absolute monarchy and a dictatorship (besides that monarchies are usually long-established, while dictatorships are sudden), The Good King is not this trope. The Good King was supposed to rule. He inherited the throne. Dictators take power illegally. They weren't supposed to rule.
May involve a plot where the heroes save the country from the supposed evil ruler, and then it's revealed that the people would rather see things as they were before.
Sister Trope to The Good King. Sub-Trope of The Dictatorship. Related to Bait-and-Switch Tyrant. Compare and contrast The Generalissimo. See also Democracy Is Bad, Democracy Is Flawed, Hobbes Was Right, The Extremist Was Right, Intellectually Supported Tyranny.
Real Life[]
Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a legendary Roman general, who, sometime after he retired to his farm, was given total power in Rome to fight off an invasion. Cincinnatus' status as a dictator afforded him six months of total power over Rome by Roman law. His fame comes from the fact that he repulsed the invasion and conquered the invaders in sixteen days, then handed power right back to Rome even though he was legally entitled to continue ruling for the rest of his "term" as dictator. The city of Cincinnati in the USA's state of Ohio is partly named for him, and then there's the Society of the Cincinnati (see below). A year later, Cincinnatus was appointed dictator for a second time, due to an alleged plot by Spurius Maelius to seize power and name himself king. This term was even shorter, as Maelius refused to answer a summons from Cincinnatus to defend himself against the allegations, and was killed by Roman soldiers. Cincinnatus immediately resigned and went back to his farm. There was an added reason for why this became so remarkable: when Cincinnatus took up the dictatorship, the Roman Republic was only fifty years old and many in the Senate did not remember the revolt against Tarquin. That a Roman citizen could be invested with such power and then willingly give it up demonstrated the durability of the principles and revolutionary spirit of the Republic's founding.
After Action Reports/ Let's Plays[]
The Hohenzollern Empire: Cincinnatus was referred to as such, and Princess Willhelma plans to follow his example! (minus the Dictator part, for obvious reasons)